A solo essay on the public conversion to Christianity of figures in Silicon Valley's rationalist and investor circles, including crypto and AI wealth, and their attendance at Peter Thiel's invitation-only lectures on the Antichrist. Pinchbeck reads this as a crisis of legitimation rather than a spiritual awakening, and draws on John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, which described the collapse of public confidence in technocratic elites and their utilitarianism, and on Erich Heller's The Disinherited Mind and its account of the spiritual death produced by a worldview that treats questions of being as unaskable. He argues that scientific materialism cannot answer religious fanaticism because faith can only be met by faith, and proposes analytic or monistic idealism, which takes consciousness rather than matter as ontologically primary, as the alternative to both.
In brief
- Pinchbeck argues that the tech conversions function to legitimize authoritarianism and a hierarchical vision of power rather than to recover anything in Christ's teaching.
- Following John Ralston Saul and Erich Heller, he argues that the technocratic managerial class promised reason and efficiency and delivered meaninglessness, leaving a vacuum that traditionalist religion has rushed to fill.
- He holds that scientific materialism is structurally unable to counter religious fanaticism, since it offers a nihilistic account in which death annihilates consciousness.
- He proposes analytic idealism as more coherent than materialism, citing the hard problem of consciousness and the Nobel-recognized finding that the universe is not locally real.
- He argues the converts have made a false choice, treating literalist readings of ancient scripture as the only alternative to secular meaninglessness, when transcendent experience is directly available through psychedelics and meditation and can be interpreted through contemporary understanding.
- He sketches a synthesis, drawing on Rudolf Steiner, Gurdjieff and the Gnostics, that takes consciousness as primary while treating the material and ecological world as an expression of the sacred, and suggests the present authoritarian turn may be a clearing of ground.
Full text
Something strange is happening in the tech world. People I know, intelligent, educated, deeply embedded in Silicon Valley's rationalist and investor culture and community. They are converting to Christianity. They're not doing it quietly and privately, but loudly as a public stance. They're going to Peter Teal's invitationonly lectures on the Antichrist. They're embracing Jesus and framing their retreat from technological optimism as a return to quote unquote traditional faith. Some of these people are cryptobillionaires or pioneers in AI or other areas. And these are people whose capital and influence are shaping our world and our future. And here's what really unsettles me. I feel like they're using this Christianity as a way to justify authoritarian authoritarianism to excuse the dismantling of our democratic institutions to rationalize a hierarchical vision of power that has nothing to do with Christ's original teachings and everything to do with control and and and money.
So this isn't faith or evolution of consciousness. It's regression and fear disguised as something wise and true. So what's actually happening now is we're living through a profound crisis of legitimacy legitimate legitimation. And I have to admit even I didn't understand or see how fragile our institutions actually were. Since Trump has come back to power, he's been systematically dismantling federal agencies. Where's the opposition? the law firms, the media conglomerates, the universities, everybody's just collapsed, cratered and capitulated so easily, like they were built of papier-mâché or something. So, so why is this? Uh, I've been reading this book by John Rston Saul, Voltater's Bastards, and he kind of saw this coming in the early 1990s.
He wrote, "Populations throughout the West no longer believe in the certainty of their elites. They do not have confidence in the dominant utilitarianism." So the technocratic manager class promised us reason, efficiency, optimization. But what they ultimately delivered was not that. It was more like meaninglessness. And into this void, this kind of abbus, something is finally rushed in to fill it. Religious faith and sort of quote unquote traditional values, you know, now we're going back to the trad wife and so on. Um, yeah, I mean, I I go back to Eric Heler, who wrote a book in 1970s called The Disinherited Mind. And um he talked about um modern people who believe that any sort of larger claims about being or ontology about what is real or what life means are neither valid nor worth considering.
We're still living under Vitkinstein's kind of dictim of what you cannot speak. You must stay silent. And according to Heler, this produces quote the spiritual death suffered by man in the assess incessant struggle between arrogance and humiliation and his exposure to the mighty lovelessness of a chance constellation of energy. Scientific materialism remains the baseline worldview of the New York Times, of the New Yorker, Harvard, of people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. It isn't able to confront or answer religious fanaticism. It doesn't have any defense against it because unfortunately scientific materialism is ultimately a vacuous and nihilistic worldview and faith can only be countered by faith.
I mean if you think about it the problem is like if you're a materialist you believe that only this life exists and matters. So death is the annihilation or obliteration of any form of consciousness. So it's a very it's a very fragile and tenuous idea and it's based on this paradigm of materialism that um we can now begin to see is really quite outmoded. But the tech converts are also making a huge error. They are thinking that the only alternative to secular meaninglessness is this return to traditionalist religious structures and like rereading these ancient scriptures and so on. So they're reverting to taking twisted interpretations of scripture as the internal unchanging truth.
So this is a kind of regression that I'm that I'm calling out and kind of warning against. So what I want to propose is that there's another path and the path that restores meaning to the world without forcing us back into bron bronze age barbarism and that ontology that path is called idealism. Monistic or analytic idealism. And this is idealism as a metaphysical framework that positions consciousness, not matter, as a fundamental substrate of reality, the ontological primary or primitive. So what we call the physical universe is not the ground of being, but it actually is an emanation or projection from this underlying primordial awareness. And this isn't just like a mystical thing.
It's a position that actually makes sense of quantum mechanics, of non-orderity states of consciousness, of the deep structure of subjective experience. It really fits what we now know about the nature of reality much better than uh scientific materialism. You know, when we look at action at a distance or the discovery, you know, that won the Nobel Prize a few years ago that the universe is quote unquote not locally real. So we're we're living in a very different universe now. One that's much more dependent on the the the relative position of of of consciousness of observer than we did, you know, decades ago. Idealism is actually far more coherent than materialism as an explanation for the nature of reality.
Uh which can't materialism can't really explain consciousness. There's the hard problem of consciousness and it's also ideal idealism is more sophisticated than religious literal literalism which is kind of mistaking these kind of ancient texts as like eternal varities or eternal truths which is just so ridiculous. I mean these were books written thousands of years ago by men who you know certainly some of them had had these profound visionary experiences but you know they they had to have those experiences those transcendent moments and so on within the context of the culture of that time and now we're in a profoundly different culture in a different time and so we can't just regress back to that. we can have those transcendent experiences for ourselves um directly you know through things like psychedelics and meditation and so on and then we can interpret them through our contemporary understanding and our current wavelength of consciousness. So I think that idealism actually can synthesize what materialism and religion each kind of got partially right.
You know material materialism commits to evidence and rigor and empiricism. Religion recognizes that there is this transcendent d domain of human experience, meaning is real and that we as humans have access to transcendence and kind of our participants in a in a in a cosmic drama, you know, a hierophony, however you want to call it. This is where I feel like people like Rudolfph Steiner and other, you know, Gerff and other esoteric Christian thinkers, uh, as well as the Gnostics from from the, you know, fourth and fifth century become really helpful. So from this esoteric perspective we understand that that that Christ you know whether he was an incarnation of the divine or not which people have different opinions about really it's not about you know just we we gain salvation by believing in Christ's divinity it's that Christ provides a model that we can follow to go through an initiatory process and awaken the divine within us. So, ironically, Peter Teal has called, you know, Greta Thurberg, you know, potentially the Antichrist, but actually she's kind of actually showing us a Christlike path right now.
She's, you know, getting arrested in in Israel to, you know, maybe even being abused or tortured. She's she's showing up for the these underlying, you know, values and ideas that we find in the original texts of Christ. Um and um you know that would be if if you want to believe in this sort of idealism framework and this sort of esoteric Christian kind of paradigm that would actually be the path to salvation. Um um from from this esoteric perspective Christ's life his action and his teachings his the way he confronted the empire those are a model for how we need to work you know live to access divinity. It's not a formula for for being saved by a passive belief or faith in his divinity, but a template for our own inner work and inner transformation.
This is what says in the in the gospel of Thomas, you have to open the doors for yourself so you you will know for yourself and that requires direct experience um phenomenological experience. So what we see with Peter Teal and these other guys, the Christianity that they're embracing are the exact opposite. It's about holding hierarchy about who's in and who's out about power and domination. It's the kind of Christianity of Constantine and Napoleon, imperial Christianity. It's the Christianity of Crusades and Inquisitions and even like genocides like the one against the native people in the US. So what these people have forgotten or or maybe they never even knew it is that Christ's message was radical, egalitarian, and profoundly threatening to established power.
uh he didn't preach submitting to the rule of empire. He embodied a path of of resistance to it uh you know peacefully. Uh so here's what I want to say to the people I know in the tech world and and their allies and cronies who made this kind of regression or retreat. You actually do not have to choose between nihilistic vacuous scientific materialism and technocracy and a kind of old style obsolete religion based in scripture. Instead, you can embrace a new worldview that honors consciousness as fundamental, recognizes the reality of the sacred and take seriously the phenomenology of transcendence without collapsing into dogma or or enabling and supporting, you know, authoritarianism, fascism, and so on.
You can follow Christ's example without getting conned by something like this antichrist deception spiel of Peter Teal. Then you can use your capital and your technical capacity to serve humanity, enhance human freedom, safeguard democracy and you yourself can participate in the unfolding of consciousness instead of you know crafting tools for surveillance and control trying to consolidate power in fewer fewer oligarchic hands or actually believing that you know by just extending your physical lifespan that that's a path to some type of kind of like materialist redemption. So what I propose instead is a synthesis that we can go beyond the false choice between scientific materialism and religious faith. And maybe also we can find a surprising kind of dialectical synthesis or resolution between kind of earth justice ecological perspectives and the sort of technocratic transhumanist what's called tesreal ideology on the other hand. Okay.
So both scientific materialism and traditional religious faiths we know contain these partial truths, but they're not they don't they're not they're both both insufficient. And so we need a synthesis between materialism, scientific rationalism, and you know, traditional religion. And idealism allows us to understand how our individual subjectivities would be woven within a much greater tapestry, a kind of multi-dimensional universe formed by in a sense an infinite benevolent consciousness which we are aspect of. And with idealism, there can even be things like reincarnation, subtle bodies, angelic realms, and these would exist as morphogetic fields or archetypal dimensions in Yungian terms in the collective psyche. Um, so a synthesis between transhumanism and an earth-based mysticism would kind of recognize and embody embodiment, the material, the ecological, remain open to technological developments that support healthy, you know, human evolution and build renewable and regenerative systems for the benefit of our descendants.
We would take consciousness as primary. Yet we would still take the physical world as seriously and as something important as an expression of the divine and sacred, you know, underlying order. And we would pursue the collective emancipation of humanity while understanding this as ultimately part of a spiritual process of inner and outer transformation. So obviously this synthesis isn't here with us yet. It's it's just nent. But I believe this is a path that doesn't lead to either ecological collapse or totalitarian mind control. Right now, the pendulum has swung very hard toward authoritarianism. And unfortunately, the tech elite are helping support this this thing. the ex the excesses of Trump, the alliance between tech oligarchs and Christian nationalists, the collapse of institutional opposition.
It definitely looks very dark and very foreoding. But I want to suggest something else. This could be the necessary clearing. The ground needs to be raised so we can rebuild on firmer foundations. And I think we all know as the old saying has it, you know, that it can be darkest before the dawn. Um and you know when when we see the brutal inhumity of this authority authoritarian regime, its uh aspurgish incapacity to care about the living world, its hatred of of freedom of speech and human freedoms, its inability to fathom human need and and and and emotion and so on. So these are all real weaknesses that we can exploit in in in sort of contrasting, you know, competing against it.
But we can only do that properly if we really have an alternative vision and even an alternative ontology. And that's what we need to articulate um now uh what what comes next after this. And so that's the work that we all have to do together. Thank you.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.